qmunicate magazine is the official magazine of the Queen Margaret Union at the University of Glasgow. If you would like to become a contributor, please attend one of our weekly meetings at 5:30pm every Wednesday in the QMU boardroom. All views expressed in qmunicate magazine are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of the Queen Margaret Union.

EP Review – Blair Coron – DO/RE

Post navigation

By the late 19th and early 20th century, many artists all over Europe were interested in blurring the edges between music and other arts; poems and paintings became compositions, and vice versa. Wassily Kandinsky, whose name Blair Coron has taken for the first song of his debut EP DO/RE, saw this relationship and was highly inspired by it in creating his works of art, affirming that he wished to make the coloured lines and blobs he drew “sing just as powerfully as I knew how”.

Blair Coron does it the other way around. His emphasis on piano tunes makes the tones come alive, like paint splattered then cautiously applied to a canvas. In the same way Kandinsky used musical titles to name is artworks, the third song of Coron’s EP is called ‘Haiku’. And while song titles such as ‘Arpeggios For Salvino’ are a bit too much for me, the music is honest, mysterious, expressive and surprising; so sweet, so lovely.

Only one song on the EP has lyrics: ‘Abstract #32’ is a spoken word piece performed in a wonderfully quiet, careful voice. Full of grand language like “brilliant explosions of architectural abstraction” and “the era of self-obsession”, it is thus very well suited to this complex, philosophical work. After many soft words and mindful piano scales – sometimes transforming into electronic beats – the sound comes flooding in at the end of the last song, ‘Arabesque’, as if all the tension that has been built up over the previous tracks is finally allowed to escape. Coron says: “It took billions of years just to get to this moment, for the universe to fall in love with itself all over again.” Somehow, his contemporary yet classical music is the perfect soundtrack to this event.